Tag: debate moderators

The moment political junkies and partisan players dreamed for arrived recently: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had their first Presidential debate. And boy was it a shit show! Between Trump being, well, Trump, Harris being as vague and clueless as possible, and the two debate moderators all but being Harris/Walz 24 cheerleaders, the first (and possibly only) debate settled one thing.

Presidential debates have become the drizzling shits.

Although the quality of candidates has gone down faster than Bill Clinton’s pants at a nudist colony of Playboy Playmates, the candidates themselves aren’t solely to blame. It’s the debate moderators who are the #5 combo meal from Taco Bell that make the drizzling shits that much shittier.

debate moderators

What the Left thinks it means – journalists whose expertise adds gravitas to political debates

What it really means – political operatives disguised as journalists

If you’ve been reading my entries for any length of time (and if you haven’t, I can’t say as I blame you), you’ll know I have a healthy contempt for the modern media. And by healthy I mean professional body builder level. That comes from years of studying it, both in an attempt to become one and in critiquing it to better understand what I’m being told. Oh, and to write blog posts!

During these years, I watched reporters and journalists go from attack dogs to lap dogs, from the Fourth Estate to the Fifth Column, and other somewhat witty turns of a phrase. The minute journalism took a turn for the worst was when its practitioners realized they could advance personal and ideological agendas within their reporting. A sympathetic word here, a dismissing tone there, and before you know it…an echo chamber than puts the Grand Canyon to shame.

But I’m sure having an industry where the majority of participants agree with each other on most every issue and on who deserves to be discredited could never have an impact on how Presidential debates would be moderated, amirite?

Not so much.

When moderators turn into advocates, the Presidential debates turn into a situation that makes Custer’s Last Stand look evenly matched. We saw that with Candy Crowley, who did a live fact check of then-candidate Mitt “Mayo Is My Sriracha” Romney in his 2012 debate with then-President Barack “I’m Too Lame to Have a Nickname” Obama, showed the damage a moderator can have on a campaign. After she “corrected” Romney, his campaign was never the same. People saw Romney as a liar, and he ultimately lost the Presidency.

But there’s a reason why so many people remember Crowley’s interjection. Turns out she was completely fucking wrong. Of course, after Obama had secured victory and was cruising through his final term in office, that’s when the scrutiny got to be too hot to ignore. Crowley was never the same, but she managed to get the desired effect: reelecting a man who shouldn’t run a lemonade stand in the Sahara Desert let alone the most powerful country in the world. The damage was done, and the mea culpas were too late to be effective.

And then every moderator decided to get in on the live fact checking act with varying degrees of success and dumbfuckery. With Donald Trump, it was both easy and difficult to fact check him in real time because they “knew” he was lying, but the “sheer magnitude” made it hard to keep up. It must have been so tiring they forgot to fact check Hillary Clinton, Brick Tamland, and Kamala Harris. I mean, that’s the only possible explanation for their one-sided approach to holding politicians accountable, right?

Yeah, and if you believe that, I have swamp land in the Sahara Desert conveniently located near a lemonade stand that I’d love to sell you.

Although this concept seems to be lost on the current generation of media squawking heads, their job when moderating a debate isn’t to try to check facts of one side or the other; it’s to fucking moderate the fucking debate! I know that’s a lot of profanity for one statement, but it needs to be said in the hopes it penetrates their well-coiffed skulls.

And maybe this point needs to be reinforced. With the most recent debate, Trump spoke longer than Harris, which is something within the moderators’ power to address. Sure, cutting off mics or trying to interrupt the candidates when they bloviate are tools, but they aren’t as effective as a moderator saying, “President Trump, shut the fuck up!” Ideally, both sides should get approximately equal time and not let one or the other get the lion’s share.

Along with that, moderators should take it upon themselves to hold candidates to the same standard of questioning. It’s one thing if the questions are tough across the board and follow-ups are equally challenging. It’s quite another when one candidate gets more grilled than the dinner options at Steak-A-Palooza and the other gets questions no more challenging than “What is your favorite Taylor Swift song?” (The correct answer: none of them.)

But that’s part of the echo chamber the media find themselves in repeatedly. They want their side to win, but they aren’t willing to come out and say it for fear of the mask dropping too much. See, they want to be Leftist stenographers but they also want the protection against accusations of bias that come with being a journalist (or at least did before these fucknuggets ruined it).

And now this stench is affecting how debate moderators act.

Fucking yay.

Since we can’t trust the media to do the right thing, it’s incumbent upon us to hold debate moderators the way they treat any Republican to the right of Karl Marx: they’re fucking liars, and we know it. But instead of turning off the debates, we should really lean into them and see where the moderators’ biases lie. Once we get that figured out, we can determine how trustworthy they are and adjust our expectations accordingly. Granted, these expectations are bound to be lower than a snake’s belly button piercing, but at least you’ll have something better to do than listen to Kamala Harris dodge simple questions.